Note from your guide: This page is under construction. I'll be adding annotations in due time. In the meantime, I'll begin with a general annotation lifted from Whitman. --Jimmie Killingsworth
The talented, the artist, the ingenious, the editor, the stateman, the erudite . . they are not unappreciated . . they fall in their place and do their work. The soul of the nation also does its work. No disguise can pass on it . . no disguise can conceal from it. It rejects none, it permits all. Only toward as good as itself and toward the like of itself will it advance half-way. An individual is as superb as a nation when he has the qualities which make a superb nation. The soul of the largest and wealthiest and proudest nation may go half-way to meet that of its poets. The signs are effectual. There is no fear of mistake. If the one is true the other is true. The proof of a poet is that his country absorbs him as affectionately as he has absorbed it.
--Walt Whitman, Preface to Leaves of Grass (1855)
Allen, Gay Wilson. The Solitary Singer. New York: Macmillan, 1955.
Aspiz, Harold. Walt Whitman and the Body Beautiful. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 1980.
Asselineau, Roger. The Evolution of Walt Whitman. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1960.
Beach, Christopher. The Politics of Distinction: Whitman and the Discourses of Nineteenth-Century America. Athens: U of Georgia P, 1996.
Black, Stephen A. Whitman's Journey into Chaos: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Poetic Process. Princeton: Princeton UP, 1975.
Cady, Joseph. "Drum-Taps and Nineteenth-Century Male Homosexual Literature." Walt Whitman: Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985: 49-59.
Erkilla, Betsy, and Jay Grossman, eds. Breaking Bonds: Whitman and American Cultural Studies. New York: Oxford UP, 1996.
Fone, Byrne. Masculine Landscapes: Walt Whitman and the Homoerotic Text. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1992.
Griffith, Clark. "Sex and Death: The Significance of Whitman's Calamus Themes." Philological Quarterly 39 (1960): 18-38.
Helms, Alan. "'Hints . . . Faint Clews and Indirections': Whitman's Homosexual Disguises." Walt Whitman: Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1985: 61-67
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. ³Another Source for Whitman's Use of 'Electric.'² Walt Whitman Review 23 (1979): 129-32.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. The Growth of Leaves of Grass: The Organic Tradition in Whitman Studies. Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993. (Invited contribution to the series Literary Criticism in Perspective.)
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "'I Sing the Body Electric': A Correction in Chronology." Walt Whitman Review 26 (1980): 31.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "The Saturday Press." American Literary Magazines: The Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries. Ed. Edward Chielens. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1986: 357-64.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "Sentimentality and Homosexuality in Whitman's 'Calamus.'" ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 29 (1983): 144-53.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "Tropes of Selfhood: Whitman's Expressive Individualism." The Life after the Life: The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman. Ed. Robert K. Martin Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1992: 39-52.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "Whitman and Motherhood: A Historical View." American Literature 54 (1982): 28-43.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "Whitman's I: Person, Persona, Self, Sign." Approaches to Teaching Leaves of Grass. Ed. Donald D. Kummings. New York: MLA, 1990: 28-40.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. ³Whitman's Love-Spendings.² Walt Whitman Review 26 (1980): 145-53.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. Whitman's Poetry of the Body: Sexuality, Politics, and the Text. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P, 1989.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "Walt Whitman's Pose and the Ethics of Sexual Liberation." Walt Whitman Here and Now. Ed. Joann P. Krieg. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood, 1985: 69-78.
Killingsworth, M. Jimmie. "Whitman's Sexual Themes during a Decade of Revision: 1866-1876." The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4 (1986): 7-15.
Lynch, Michael. "'Here is Adhesiveness': From Friendship to Homosexuality." Victorian Studies 29 (1985): 67-96.
Martin, Robert K. The Homosexual Tradition in American Poetry. Austin: U of Texas P, 1979.
Martin, Robert K. "Walt Whitman and Thomas Mann." Walt Whitman Quarterly Review 4 (1986): 1-6.
Martin, Robert K. "Whitman's 'Song of Myself': Homosexual Dream and Vision." Partisan Review 42 (1975): 80-96.
Martin, Robert K., ed. The Continuing Presence of Walt Whitman: The Life after the Life. Iowa City: U of Iowa P, 1992.
Matthiessen, F. O. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. London: Oxford UP, 1941.
Miller, Edwin Haviland. Walt Whitman's Poetry: A Psychological Journey. New York: New York UP, 1968.
Miller, James E., Jr. "Whitman's Omnisexual Vision." The Chief Glory of Every People: Essays on Classic American Writers. Ed. Matthew J. Bruccoli. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1973: 253-59
Moon, Michael. Disseminating Whitman: Revision and Corporeality in "Leaves of Grass." Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1991.
Nathanson, Tenney. Whitman's Presence: Body, Voice, and Writing in Leaves of Grass. New York: New York University Press, 1992.
Parker, Hershel. "The Real 'Live Oak, with Moss': Straight Talk about Whitman's 'Gay Manifesto.'" Nineteenth-Century Literature 51 (1996): 145-60.
Reynolds, David S. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Knopf, 1988.
Reynolds, David S. Walt Whitman's America: A Culturnal Biography. New York: Knopf, 1995.
Schmidgall, Gary. Walt Whitman: A Gay Life. New York: Dutton, 1997.
Shively, Charley. Calamus Lovers: Whitman's Working Class Camerados. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1987.
Shively, Charley. Drum Beats: Walt Whitman¹s Civil War Boy Lovers. San Francisco: Gay Sunshine Press, 1989.
Zweig, Paul. Walt Whitman: The Making of a Poet. New York: Basic, 1984.